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Just got this email from H&R Block
Nothing on SNOPES yet ....
Economic Stimulus 2009
Workers
The "Making Work Pay" Credit for 2009 and 2010 is a tax credit for up to $400 for working individuals and up to $800 for couples.
Retirees and disabled individuals
Those receiving Social Security benefits and individuals on disability will receive a one-time payment of $250 in 2009.
Unemployed
Temporary suspension of taxation on unemployment benefits. The jobless get a little more help with a $25 increase in weekly benefit checks through 2009 and suspension of federal tax on the first $2,400 of unemployment benefits received in 2009.
First-time home buyers
First-time home buyer credit increased to $8,000 for qualified first-time home buyers purchasing homes after Dec. 31, 2008 and before Dec. 1, 2009; repayment requirement waived unless sold or no longer principal residence within 36 months.
College-bound
The "American Opportunity Tax Credit" - an enhanced Hope Credit that provides 100% credit for the first $2,000 and 25% for the next $2,000 on qualified expenses such as tuition and books; the credit is 40% refundable, meaning even taxpayers who have no tax liability can receive a credit for 40% of qualified education expenses, up to $1,000.
*Most provisions are subject to phase-out for higher-income individuals.
Economic Stimulus 2009The American Recovery & Reinvestment Act (AARA)
On Friday, Feb. 13, Congress voted in favor of a whopping $787 billion stimulus package, designed to kick-start the sagging economy and get millions of Americans back to work, and the country back on its feet. President Obama is expected to sign the historic bill into law on Tuesday, Feb. 17 – in Denver, Colorado.
So what is the 2009 stimulus plan and how might ii affect me and my family?
Officially known as The American Recovery & Reinvestment Act (AARA), the stimulus plan includes tax relief for middle-income families and spending programs for things like transportation, environmental and broadband infrastructure projects, aid for states and energy assistance, all designed to create millions of good-paying jobs.
The good news is that 95% of America's taxpayers will benefit from at least one of the tax breaks. Unlike the 2008 Economic Stimulus, there will not be stimulus rebate payment checks in 2009 for the majority of Americans.
While some of the relief will be paid this year, the majority of the relief for an average taxpayer is most likely to come next year.
Tax analysts from The Tax Institute at H&R Block will discuss some of the key provisions of AARA in our ongoing "stimulus video" series on H&R Block's community site, Digits, and the team will address more detailed stimulus information in the 'Frequently Asked Questions' below. Both the videos and the FAQs will continually be updated as more information is released, so please check back often for the latest news.
Key taxpayer provisions: Tax credit for workers: for 2009 and 2010 there is a "making work pay" tax credit of up to $400 for working individuals and up to $800 for couples
Temporary suspension of taxation on unemployment benefits: the jobless get a little more help with a $25 increase in weekly benefit checks through 2009 and suspension of federal tax on the first $2,400 of unemployment benefits received in 2009
Retirees and disabled individuals: those receiving Social Security benefits and individuals on disability will receive a one-time payment of $250
First-time home buyer credit: increased to $8,000 for qualified first-time homebuyers purchasing homes after Dec. 31, 2008 and before Dec. 1, 2009; repayment requirement waived unless sold or no longer principal residence within 36 months
"American Opportunity Tax Credit" for education: an 'enhanced' Hope credit that provides 100% credit for the first $2,000 and 25% for the next $2,000 on qualified expenses such as tuition and books; the credit is 40% refundable, meaning even taxpayers who have no tax liability can receive a credit for 40% of qualified college expenses, up to $1,000
529 plans: qualified computer technology and equipment is now allowed as higher education expenses from the plan, so distributions from 529 plans to buy a computer, for example, for college will not be taxable
Earned Income Tax Credit: increased EITC amounts for families with 3 or more children and additional marriage penalty relief
Additional Child Tax Credit: earnings threshold is lowered $3,000, helping more people qualify for the credit and receive more money; for 2008 the earnings threshold was $8,500
Vehicle purchase: state and local sales taxes paid for purchases of qualified new motor vehicles are deductible
AMT: a one year patch for 2009 of the Alternative Minimum Tax (AMT) to prevent as many as 24 million middle-income households from being hit with a tax that was originally designed to prevent the very wealthy from avoiding taxes
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USDA awarding $310 million for broadband projects
By Joelle Tessler, Ap Technology Writer
21 mins ago
WASHINGTON – The Agriculture Department is handing out nearly $310 million in stimulus money to bring high-speed Internet connections to 14 rural communities around the country.
The awards being announced Monday amount to the largest round of government funding for broadband since Congress included $7.2 billion for high-speed networks and adoption programs in last year's stimulus bill.
The money is intended to bring jobs and economic opportunities to rural communities, poor neighborhoods and other parts of the country that are falling behind in the information age. It is also intended to pay for the network infrastructure needed to deliver telemedicine services, offer online classes and provide other applications that require a lot of bandwidth.
"This big batch of projects will create urgently needed jobs now and also build networks that will fuel rural economic development for years to come," said Jonathan Adelstein, who heads the Agriculture Department's Rural Utilities Service, which is awarding the money.
The awards being announced Monday include:
• an $88.1 million grant and loan to an Alaskan telecommunications company that will build "middle mile" networks to connect 65 towns and villages in southwestern Alaska to the Internet.
• a $19.1 million grant and loan to a Missouri electric cooperative to build a fiber-optic network that will reach nearly 5,000 homes, businesses, public safety entities and community organizations in rural Ralls County, Mo.
• a $3.9 million grant to a unit of TDS Telecommunications Corp. to build a digital subscriber line network to serve homes, businesses and community institutions in sparsely populated parts of Alabama.
• a $376,000 grant and loan to a telephone company to build a WiMax network that can deliver wireless broadband connections to nearly 325 homes in northeast Iowa.
Including the latest round of funding, the Rural Utilities Service has doled out $363.7 million for 22 broadband projects across the country. The Agriculture Department will award a total of $2.5 billion in stimulus money for broadband programs.
The National Telecommunications and Information Administration, an arm of the Commerce Department, is handing out the remaining $4.7 billion in stimulus funding for broadband. As of last week, NTIA had awarded roughly $200 million in grants for 15 projects.
Applications for the next and final round of broadband funding are due by March 15.
In the second round, the Agriculture Department will focus on projects that provide "last-mile" connections that link homes, businesses and other end users to the Internet. The Commerce Department will focus on "middle-mile" projects that connect anchor institutions such as libraries, colleges and public safety agencies. It will also award some money for computing centers in libraries, colleges and other public facilities, and adoption programs that teach people how to use the Internet.
Demand for the broadband money has been intense, far outstripping the amount available. The Commerce and Agriculture departments already have received nearly 2,200 applications requesting a total of $28 billion.
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20100125/...imulus_funding
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STIMULUS WATCH: Unemployment eclipses fiscal jolt
Jim Kuhnhenn And Brett J. Blackledge, Associated Press Writers
Thu Feb 18, 7:04 am ET
WASHINGTON – The jobless got a hand. Taxpayers got tax breaks. And a sinking economy stabilized.
But the public's response to President Barack Obama's recession-fighting policies has been increasingly dreary. And the reason is simple: six months of unemployment above 9.6 percent.
"It doesn't yet feel like much of a recovery," Obama had to concede Wednesday, even as he sought to promote his year-old massive economic stimulus bill.
Unemployment trumps all else. It provides a lens through which the public reads an economic narrative of bank bailouts, executive bonuses, expensive health care remedies and exploding debt.
In that environment, gross domestic product growth is an abstraction. Obama gets little credit for an economic turnaround under his watch. And Republicans seek political advantage by merely asking, "Where are the jobs?"
This week, on the anniversary of the stimulus plan, the White House is seeking redress. Obama and the president's political arm at the Democratic National Committee are casting the program — initially priced at $787 billion and now estimated at $862 billion — as a demonstrable success and its critics as hypocrites.
It's a political necessity.
As with previous instances of high unemployment, the public's skepticism — anger, even — poses a threat to the president's party in Congress. In 1982, with unemployment above 10 percent and Ronald Reagan in the White House, Republicans lost 26 House seats.
The public's frustration also threatens efforts in Congress to win the kind of new short-term spending the White House believes the economy needs to stay on a positive trajectory.
Support for the stimulus plan has gone from 55 percent last June to 38 percent, according to a poll by the Pew Research Center this month. More worrisome for Obama's allies in Congress, support for the stimulus fell 18 percentage points, to 60 percent, among voters who identified themselves as Democrats.
"For the first time, we have as many people saying that Obama's policies have made things worse as say his policies have made them better," said Pew Research Center President Andrew Kohut. "In all fairness, many more people say it's too early to tell."
With that in mind, the White House dispatched Cabinet members and Vice President Joe Biden to 35 communities across the country to promote programs funded by the stimulus. Biden issued a glowing first-year report, and the president declared, "We have rescued this economy from the worst of this crisis."
In an e-mail to Obama's vast network of presidential campaign supporters, his former campaign manager, David Plouffe, boiled down the pitch: On the first anniversary of the stimulus package, job losses have seen a reversal of the trend experienced in the last year of the Bush administration.
It's a simple and effective message, even though many economists say a financial sector rescue initiated by the Bush administration and by the Federal Reserve are also factors affecting the changing, positive turn.
White House officials maintain that the stimulus suffered a certain guilt by association with the unpopular $700 billion Wall Street bailout fund.
"People have conflated money lent to banks — much of it paid back with interest — to stabilize the financial system, or investments that had to be made in restructuring auto companies, with the recovery plans," White House spokesman Robert Gibbs said Wednesday. "I'm not sure exactly what could have been done to rectify that."
But Pew's Kohut says the public does distinguish between the programs, and while more disapprove than approve of both, people have a much more negative reaction to the bank bailout than to the stimulus.
What's more, the White House and the national Democratic Party have launched a counterattack on Republicans, noting that while many in the GOP criticize the stimulus package, several have applauded spending in their own home districts. "They can't really have it both ways," White House communications director Dan Pfeiffer said on his White House blog.
Still, the administration has had to make its own corrections along the way, which haven't helped the salesmanship. Before Obama took office in January 2009, his economists promised that a sizable jolt to the economy would keep employment below 8 percent.
It didn't.
To be sure, few economists back then saw the recession plunging as low as it did and many agreed with the Obama team's projections. But Obama has borne the criticism for that misjudgment.
The administration also sought to make the program a model of transparency, posting data on spending, projects and contracts. New or saved jobs, administration officials said, would be counted. But the data exposed serious counting flaws. In the end, the White House was left estimating job creation after all.
With the public losing faith in the stimulus, the White House is begging for some patience. "We've only been halfway through the act," Biden said on CBS Wednesday. "The job-creating portions are really loaded at the second half."
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20100218/...mulus_politics
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States must fill $1 trillion pension gap
By Mark Scolforo, Associated Press Writer
Thu Feb 18, 9:16 am ET
HARRISBURG, Pa. – States may be forced to reduce benefits, raise taxes or slash government services to address a $1 trillion funding shortfall in public sector retirement benefits, according to a new study that warns of even more debilitating costs if immediate action isn't taken.
The Pew Center on the States released a survey Thursday of state-administered pension plans, retiree health care and other post-employment benefits in all 50 states that blamed a decade's worth of policy decisions for leaving them shortchanged.
The result for some states will be "high annual costs that come with significant unfunded liabilities, lower bond ratings, less money available for services, higher taxes and the specter of worsening problems in the future," the study said.
The cost of the trillion-dollar shortfall, which will be paid over the coming decades, is about $8,800 for each American household. The study did not include many city, county and municipal pension plans, which are thought to have similar underfunding.
"We have a significant problem now, but it's a problem that can be solved by taking relatively modest steps," said Susan K. Urahn, the center's managing director. "If they don't do anything, if they wait, eventually they will have an unmanageable crisis on their hands."
As of 2008, states had $2.4 trillion to meet $3.4 trillion in promised pension, health care and other post-retirement benefits, according to the report.
The true gap may even be wider, because the study did not account for the full impact of investment losses in late 2008, during the stock market downturn, and because many plans employ multiyear smoothing techniques to lessen the effect of a single year's losses. But more recent stock market returns could help — on Wednesday, for example, Pennsylvania's $47 billion public school pension plan reported it had earned about 12 percent on investments in the 2009 calendar year.
Pew deemed 16 states solid performers in how they fund pensions, 15 needing improvement and 19 considered to be facing serious concerns.
"Meanwhile, more and more baby boomers in state and local government are nearing retirement, and many will live longer than earlier generations — meaning that if states do not get a handle on the costs of post-employment benefits now, the problem likely will get far worse, with states facing debilitating costs," the study said.
The exploding financial burden could be a bitter pill for taxpayers, many of whom will not be collecting similar pensions or other benefits when they retire, said David Kline with the California Taxpayers' Association. About one in five private sector workers have traditional defined benefit pensions, compared with about 90 percent of public-sector employees — including some that do not get Social Security.
"Taxpayers in the future will be paying for people who worked decades before they may have even lived in the area or begun paying taxes, because the obligation for these benefits is just snowballing," Kline said.
The study graded states on how well they have managed employees' retirement benefits. Florida, Idaho, New York, North Carolina and Wisconsin began the current recession with fully funded pension systems, while eight states have left more than one-third of their pension liability unfunded.
Illinois was rated the most troubled pension system during the study period, with a 54 percent funding level and a total liability of more than $54 billion.
In Pennsylvania, a series of decisions by the Legislature and governor have shielded taxpayers from much of the pain for the past decade, but costs of less than $1 billion a year now is projected to climb to about $6 billion annually in the coming three years.
The report said policy makers have exacerbated the problem by expanding benefits, relying on overly optimistic assumptions about investment returns and failing to sufficient fund the programs.
"Even though the actuaries tell the states what they should be doing, the states feel free to ignore that," said Olivia Mitchell, director of the Pension Research Council at the University of Pennsylvania's Wharton School. "So putting some teeth behind the requirements is really the problem."
Pew calculated a $587 billion national cost for current and future retiree health care and other nonpension retirement benefits, with only about 5 percent of that amount funded as of 2008. The cost of health care and the number of retirees are both on the rise, adding to the pressure on states.
The study found that 15 states made some legislative changes to their state-run systems last year, 12 did so in 2008 and 11 in 2007. About a third of states had formal efforts to study potential reforms under way last year.
"Pension plans work when they are allowed to work, and part of that dynamic is that sometimes adjustments have to be made," said Keith Brainard, research director with the National Association of State Retirement Administrators. "It's important not to take away decent retirement benefits for some of the few people that have them."
Pew said states should consider changes that have proven to be effective and politically viable. Among them: setting minimum contribution levels that are actuarially sound, sharing some of the investment risk with employees, cutting benefits, increasing the minimum retirement age, making employees pay more into the system and providing more robust oversight and investment rules.
Mitchell said many states have constitutional prohibitions against lowering employee pension benefits, but health care programs can more easily be altered.
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20100218/...R5c3RhdGVzbQ--
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FCC seeking more spectrum for wireless broadband
Joelle Tessler, Ap Technology Writer – Wed Feb 24, 3:40 pm ET
WASHINGTON – Federal regulators are hoping to find more wireless spectrum for mobile broadband services by reallocating some airwaves now assigned to television broadcasters and others.
Under a long-awaited proposal outlined by the Federal Communications Commission on Wednesday, broadcasters and other existing spectrum holders would voluntarily give back some spectrum and share in proceeds raised by government auctions of those airwaves to wireless companies.
Wireless carriers have been clamoring for more spectrum as their customers increasingly check e-mail, update Facebook and watch video on the go. Broadband services are already choking in some markets, and next-generation services will tax wireless networks even more.
"Although the potential of mobile broadband is limitless, its oxygen supply is not," FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski said in a speech at the New America Foundation in Washington. "Spectrum — our airwaves — really is the oxygen of mobile broadband service. Without sufficient spectrum, we will starve mobile broadband of the nourishment it needs to thrive."
Finding more wireless spectrum will also be an important piece of the FCC's plan to bring affordable high-speed Internet connections to all Americans, particularly in rural America, Genachowski said. That plan, mandated by last year's stimulus bill, is due to Congress next month.
Genachowski said the broadband plan would include a proposal to finance wireless networks through the federal Universal Service Fund, which subsidizes telephone service in poor and rural areas through a surcharge on long-distance bills.
The FCC plan would set a goal of freeing 500 megahertz of wireless spectrum over the next decade. That would include spectrum licensed to companies through government auctions as well as unlicensed spectrum open to all, such as airwaves used for Wi-Fi networks. The wireless industry currently has about 500 megahertz of spectrum available for licensed use.
Genachowski said broadcast television spectrum is particularly attractive for broadband because those airwaves are not being put to efficient use even though they contain "billions of dollars of unlocked value." TV broadcasters hold nearly 300 megahertz of spectrum, but use that spectrum mostly to serve the 10 percent of American homes that still rely solely on over-the-air TV signals.
Genachowski stressed that the FCC's proposed "Mobile Future Auction" program would be voluntary for broadcasters and would allow them to retain enough spectrum to continue providing a free, over-the-air signal.
Still, the proposal has run into substantial opposition from the broadcast industry.
"As a one-to-many transmission medium, broadcasters are ready to make the case that we are far and away the most efficient users of spectrum in today's communications marketplace," Dennis Wharton, executive vice president of the National Association of Broadcasters, said in a statement. "We look forward to working with policymakers to help expand the rollout of broadband without threatening the future of free and local television."
Other pieces of the FCC proposal would allow other companies that hold wireless spectrum — including mobile satellite companies that provide communications services over satellite connections — to use their spectrum to deliver broadband or transfer their airwaves to other users.
In addition, the plan would encourage more use of unlicensed spectrum and new technologies that allow multiple users to share spectrum.
CTIA-The Wireless Association, a trade group, praised the new FCC proposals as "essential to the wireless industry's ability to continue to provide and expand Americans' access to broadband anywhere and anytime."
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20100224/...NzZWVraW5nbW8-
